I have read almost every single post in this forum, but have yet to find any information that would assist me in designing and coding an excellent GUI that is aesthetically appealing. In other words, I'm not referring to utilizing patterns in GUI design, such as MVC, but rather to utilizing insets, padding, metal themes, etc. in designing an elegant GUI that follows all HCI conventions. I've looked at the Java L&F guidelines, and many other guides on the internet but have not found what I'm looking for. Basically, I want to design and code a GUI that is as good as the ones used in JBuilder5 or Together ControlCenter 5.x. Does anybody know how I can accomplish this?
My guess is that a huge amount of work went into the Together and JBuilder GUI. I would further guess that a not-insignificant amount of custom coding went into those GUIs, and finally that the people coding them were top notch, elite Swing developers. I think achieving that degree of quality would be ambitious for a production system and would require everything from great programming to graphic design. For the developer certification, don't even go there!
This endeavor is not merely intended for this project; in fact, it's not intended solely for this project at all. I want to be able to reuse the existing code base to build other applications that I'll need for other projects in my programming career. I doubt any of these elite Swing developers would volunteer any information, given the present-day business environments, but if any of you have ideas as to how I could implement some of the features of these GUIs, I would appreciate it.
I took a look at the JBuilder GUI just now. It has some tabbed views, tree controls, scrollpanes, and some toolbars with graphical icons. All these things are supported within the standard Swing set of widgets... So maybe I good exercise would be to try to reproduce the main screen of JBuilder (without any functionality). As for the text editor, that's a very advanced control to write. Swing does have a basic HTML viewer/editor built in, but that's about it. One piece of advice: I would separate your goals for developer certification from your other goals to start putting together a professional-caliber development framework. I think adding too much sophistication to the developer assignment would obscure the point of the assignment, which is that you understand basic programming fundamentals. Vlad
Post by:autobot
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